The Year Without Coffee

Five days it’s been since I last sipped a cup of coffee. Not very long, true. But consider the context: Before January 1, 2009, I’d gone easily six months solid without not having at least one cup of coffee a day. Through cross country flights, work, road trips, all-nighters, and quiet Sundays, never was a morning complete without that cup of coffee.

Yet here I stand, at the dawn of a new year, declaring my abstinence from this old friend. An entire year without a single cup of joe.  Whether it will be a battle between time and force of will, a wonderful and memorable experiment, or possibly a well-intentioned but ultimately doomed enterprise – well, only time will tell.

Why am I doing this?

Coffee is not evil. It is not debilitating. On the contrary, it is warm and filling, and with a little bit of cream or milk, it tastes most excellent. But… coffee also is not a health food. In fact, it has a bunch of pretty negative qualities. It leaches calcium from your body. It dehydrates you. It’s a diuretic. These things are not good for you; they speed the aging process.  And, most important to me, over the past year coffee has become an unbreakable habit and, thus, a crutch.

To wake, each and every day, with the idea that my morning cannot truly be OK until I’ve had that first drink of café, well, it just doesn’t sit right with me. So at some point last fall, I started to ponder the possibility of quitting ol’ Joe. At first I thought I’d try a month without it. But then I started to realize that wasn’t going to do the trick. What I needed was a total break from the bean. I’d go whole year sans java. And as 2008 drew to a conclusion, the idea just kept germinating, until it sprouted green and true.

What is the upside?

the health benefits of tea, according to wikipedia.org

In the other corner, we have tea. Tea, tea, the magical elixir. Full of anti-oxidants, battler of free radicals. And tea, unlike coffee, is available in a mind boggling array of flavors and qualities. True, coffee also can be had in a vast array of formulations. And, yes, different beans have different tastes.

But tea itself is among the most varied and versatile foods there are. From black to white, green to herbal, hot to cold, spicy to sweet, for breakfast or dinner, to stimulate or to relax, to fulfill or to cleanse, there is a tea for that! Tea, it seems, is a wonderfood. And I aim to taste them all!

soy chai latte in a cup

So I plan on this: during my 365 days of coffee-free living, I will use the opportunity to explore and share as many new teas as I can! Just five days in on my trek, and each day has brought it’s own version. New Year’s Day, I took the easy way out, slurping a Chai latte from Starbucks. Then, a couple of green teas at home. And a pot of black China tea shared with my mom at the Kensington Cafe. Yesterday I downed a couple servings of home made Zhena’s chai tea. And today, it is Zhena’s Breakfast Bliss black tea. Yum.

morning tea. yumm.

I’ll be posting weekly updates and reviews of my teasplorations. Until the first one, just know that so far I am very encouraged that, rather than the fear and skepticism I felt just a couple of days ago, I am totally encouraged and confident that I really will make it through the whole year without a single drop of coffee! Yes, the old stimulant is being replaced with a new one, but it’s like going from eating a fast food burger to a organic vegetable. They are both food, but one is practically poisonous and the other is nutritious and delicious!